Why You Should Consider Podcasting for Your Corporate Training

The explosive growth in long form podcast listening was years in the making. I was at the gym one day in November 2014 when I realized the breakthrough had happened.

As I walked among the rows of cardio machines, seeking an available treadmill, no one was watching their built-in TV. Each cardio exerciser wore earbuds, leading to a phone, which displayed a large S in a black square. All down the row, treadmill after treadmill, S after S after S.

Starting in October 2014, Serial created a sensation, quickly escalating to two million downloads per episode. Episodes from Serial have been downloaded 340 million times, establishing an ongoing world record.

When I hosted my first podcast back in 2006, it seemed only high tech professionals and music hipsters listened to podcasts. But with Serial, podcasting finally broke through from the technorati to the mainstream.

What Do You Mean by “Podcasting”?

Technically, a podcast is audio or video content that people can subscribe to, distributed over the Internet. Here, I’m using “podcasting” sloppily, in the way most people mean it: as audio content that extends across multiple related episodes, consumed via mobile device.

Thus, by definition, a single audio file cannot be a podcast. When you think “podcast,” think episodes.

Seriously? People Listen to Podcasts?

Yep. In the four years since Serial debuted, the amount of US podcast listeners has nearly doubled, from 12% of the population to 24% today [1].The listening audience skews young, with 28% aged 18 – 34 (Gen Z, Millennials) and another 31% aged 35-54 (Millennials, Gen X, Boomers) [2].

Figure 1: Podcast Consumers – Age (Source: Edison Research)

About two-thirds of podcast listeners just began listening in the past three years making podcasts a growth medium. And Forbes describes the growth of podcasting as “limitless,” in part because it’s getting progressively easier to listen. Most new cars have interfaces to facilitate podcast downloads. Podcasts can now play from Apple watches.

Audience numbers for radio are down. Big gorilla advertisers such as Pepsi, Starbucks, Google, and Microsoft have increased their spending on podcast ads. Follow the money!

But What Do Podcasts Have to Do with Learning?

Simple: podcast listeners want to learn.

Research commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) asked active podcast listeners, “Why do you listen?” Uniquely among all other media, the number one answer (71% of respondents) was, “To learn, be entertained.” No other medium – news, videos, music, social media – drove that answer to the top.

Further, despite the fact that the average podcast length hits 45 minutes, 85% of people who listen to podcasts listen to the end [3].

Let that sink in for a moment. Why are we tap-dancing ourselves silly tempting audiences to finish a five-minute video, if most of them will gladly listen to us for almost an hour?

If you address a younger audience or a female audience, you really need to consider podcasting. A study by Westwood One found that:

The overall podcast audience has been 55% men / 45% women, but the women slice is growing faster. Average listening time for women grew from 4.6 hours per week in 2017, to 5.5 hours per week in 2018.

Heavy female podcast listeners are young (66% Millennials), upscale (74% earn more than 75K per year), and married with children (72%).

Time spent listening to podcasts, between July 2017 and July 2018, grew in every demographic except Baby Boomers (aged 50+).

To most Millennials, podcasting is mainstream. Radio and broadcast TV are fading legacy media.

How Do Podcasts Fit into My Training Curriculum?

Audio podcasts are typically informal, and have no set length. How might that mix into your courseware?

If your new hires typically ask the same few questions, record the answers as one podcast file each at a “snackable” length. New employees can listen to them on their new commute.

Got a sprawling sales line full of products? Field sales people can cram on features, benefits, and answers to objections by listening about a specific product on the drive to their sales call.

Do your instructor-led classes have breakout sessions, where some students finish assignments much faster than others? Have the over-achievers slip in earbuds and keep learning while the others finish up.

Radiolab. This pioneering popular science podcast thoroughly explores the sonic potential of the medium.

And lest we forget…Dell’s podcast:

Trailblazers. Noted biographer Walter Isaacson hosts this examination of how technology that is disruptive may also be uplifting.

Summary

Using addictive storytelling power to debate whether a high school student strangled his 18-year-old girlfriend, Serial kicked off an era when your students consume audio content every week. Since most podcasts listeners are Millennials, and podcast-savvy Gen Z is rushing up right behind them, it’s time to figure out where audio content fits in your corporate training mix. Would you ever release training as a podcast? Do you use audio content now to enrich current courseware? What else are you doing to make your training more mobile-friendly and appealing to younger workers?

I look forward to seeing your comments and would love to learn of your favorite podcasts.

About Scott Pinzon

Digital Media Producer, Dell EMC Education Services

Scott has enjoyed varied roles during his three decades in high tech, starting as a technical writer for the first Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) in the late 1980s, through a career as a security analyst and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), to promoting the expansion of new generic Top Level Domains as Director of Marketing for ICANN, the non-profit that coordinates the global DNS.

Scott joined EMC in 2013 as an instructional designer, and is currently a Dell EMC Education Services producer running Dell’s video studio in Seattle, Washington (affectionately nicknamed “the Panic Room”). Using his veteran background in technical marketing and adult learning, Scott has written, produced, or directed nearly 400 marketing and training videos.

Scott’s career has a clear through-line: his firm belief that the greatest gift you can give someone is to help them know or do what they couldn’t before. With creativity and a wide practical streak, across many kinds of media, Scott’s goal is to empower audiences.

7 thoughts on “Why You Should Consider Podcasting for Your Corporate Training”

Very true! If you decide to host the training on an actual podcast platform, you may be able to track metadata such as: the site that referred the listener to the link; number of listens overall; number of completed listens; and where a listener abandoned an episode. Such insights can help you shape further training for optimal consumption. Thanks for your inspirational comment, Preeti!

Just since the article published, I’ve become aware of two more training podcasts being recorded at Dell. Monday, we start a new one using Zoom, where the host is in the UK and the subject matter experts are in Seattle. Both ends will be recording quality audio, then sharing the files over OneDrive to be stitched together. So now we see that even geographical separation is no barrier to podcasting!

What great, thorough information about the powers of podcasting. You make salient points–keep it brief then make it briefer is perhaps my fave!

I encourage anyone thinking of entering the podcast pool to first scope out extended content. What are the points to be made? Is each point concise enough for one episode or need it be broken into parts? What resources do I need to invite as SMEs to support the points.

And I encourage anyone thinking along such lines to re-read your article!! Good work.

Great points, Tim. “Podcast” implies ongoing episodes. I’ve heard entertainment podcasts that clearly ran out of steam after six or eight episodes. Educational ones can have the same problem.

Not only make a plan — but with anything that extends over time, life interrupts. What is your fallback if that one special SME is unavailable? What if the host has a family emergency? Build in some flexibility from the start. If you are essentially a one-person operation, then make your episodes several at a time and dole them out periodically. If you have a month of podcasts in the can, you know you’ll hit your publication deadlines!

Fun discussion. Thanks for commenting, Tim. If anyone has read this far, I encourage you to check out Tim’s InFocus articles!